Overview

Song Director is a program that plays and keeps track of all your music files. A unique feature allows you to organize songs into any Category you wish, then view these Categories separately or combined.

Find any song or artist in the database by simply typing the first few characters of the song or artist name. As you type, Song Director immediately zeroes in on the record you want.

Song Director lets you specify any criteria to further limit the records displayed or printed. You can then play, view, edit, or export just the songs you selected. You can search for any string of characters in all your song records.

You can easily select one or multiple records to display or play. You only have to deal with the songs you want, not your entire collection.

Song Director lets you sort on any field. You can edit a record in a spreadsheet-like grid or on a separate edit screen. Some fields have user-customizable screen labels.

Song Director uses a Microsoft Access database, so your song data is accessible using many other products such as Word, Excel, and Access.

Song Director is compatible with Microsoft Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10. including on Windows tablets using these operating systems.

Adding Songs

To add your songs into the Song Director database; Choose one of the Add options from the File menu and add songs from a file, folder, or scan the entire hard drive for songs. You can still use your computer while the scanning takes place, you can drag the scan window to the side of your computer screen or bring up a program over top the scan window. For a faster scan it is better not to use the computer until the scan is finished. Song Director was tested with a 4 TB external USB 3.0 hard drive loaded with 1.6TB – 187,400 songs. It took 90 minutes to read in all the songs into the database. If you are having any difficulty in adding/scanning for songs, see the troubleshooting section of this help menu

Note 1: The adding/scanning of songs into the Song Director database does not copy the actual music. Instead, it simply keeps track of where that music file is located and plays it from the original location.

Note 2. Song Director is not designed to scan and add songs that are stored on the INTERNET like iCloud, OneDrive, etc. the songs need to be physically on your hard drive or home network drive not on a drive letter that is on the internet or Cloud. Make sure the songs are NOT stored on the internet. Some programs set up a drive letter like D: that is on the internet, but appears like it is on your computer in file explorer. If you want to experiment with scanning internet cloud drives you can, but it is not supported.

Note 3: Song Director was not designed to be used on virtual machines and virtual drives. If you want to experiment with this you can, but it is not supported.

Note 4. If you have a large amount of files to add/scan, and you won’t be using your computer during the scan, turn off your sleep mode setting in (control panel – power options) on your computer. The scan will not run if your computer is in sleep mode.

Adding Songs by scanning your drive – Click for a larger view

Adding Pictures

You can add pictures and album art to your songs. Double-click a song to open the Edit screen. On the bottom of the screen you see eight buttons for pictures. You copy and paste a picture by right-clicking your mouse on one of those buttons and choosing “Paste image”. This option will work only if there is a picture already copied onto the Windows Clipboard. You can also simply click one of the picture buttons and choose a picture file on your computer. After saving a picture, it’s file name appears in blue below the picture button. You display saved pictures by clicking the button for that picture on the Edit screen. You can also see the first three saved pictures for a song by choosing “Pictures” from the toolbar on the main Grid screen.

Adding Video

Song Director can be used to catalog and play video files also. It will look for .MP4 files and play the video and audio in the music player, but only if the “view file extensions” are turned on in Windows file explorer.

Apple Computers running Song Director

Song Director is designed for Windows.

There are many ways to run Windows programs on a iMac Apple machine. There is a program that emulates Windows for Apple computers made from Microsoft and many other programs. Microsoft Windows can be run on Apple computers using Boot Camp also. Here are some good links explaining some ways to do it:

Categories

You create a Category by clicking on the Categories button and adding a new Category. You can assign each record to Categories you create. This is great for keeping track of groups of songs. You can then view and print just the songs in that Category. You can display just the songs in that Category by double clicking on the Category name on the same screen.

Note:

If you are displaying songs in a certain Category, any songs you add are automatically assigned to that Category.

To assign a song to a Category, highlight the song you want on the first Song Director screen (the screen with the toolbar buttons at the top), then click the Assign button. The Category Assignment screen appears. Double-click on a Category in the box on the left side of the screen, and that Category will be assigned to the current song. Double-click on a Category in the box on the right side of the screen and that Category assignment will be removed from the current song. You can assign a song to as many Categories as you want.

Assigning many songs to a Category, all at once

You can easily assign many songs to one Category at the same time, or remove many songs from one Category. Select and display just the records you want (see the Selecting Records topic), then choose the option “Assign Many Records to Category” or “Remove Many Records from Category” on the Edit menu. On the next screen that is displayed, select the Category from the list and choose the appropriate button.

To display all records in your Song Director database, click the Show All button. This is useful if you previously limited the records displayed by choosing a specific Category, or by specifying a Filter or by Selecting Records.

Copying Songs to another location

To copy a song file to another device (flash drive, phone, etc.) Highlight the song in the list, right click with your mouse and choose “copy” then choose your location to copy to.

Copying more than one song at a time

There are two ways to do this:

Using the Grid:

Display the songs you want on the main Grid screen.

Go to the drop down file menu and choose “Copy All Displayed Files (Export)” and choose the location to copy the music/audio files to.

Using the Playlist:

Place the songs you want into a playlist

View the playlist then choose file from the drop down menu and choose “Copy music files to another folder” then choose your location to copy to.

Copying an album

1. Make any song in the album the current row highlighted on the Grid.
2. Click the Filter button on the Toolbar.
3. Click the button on the Filter screen that says: “Show Current Album Only”.
4. Click the “Apply Filter” button. This will show all songs in that album on the Grid.5. Choose “Copy All Displayed Files (Export)” from the File menu, then select the location to copy the music files.

OR you can use the Playlist option:

Click the Playlists button on the Toolbar.
Add a new Playlist or select an empty one.
Choose “Add all songs to Playlist” from the Edit menu.
Choose “Copy music files to another folder” from the File menu, and select your location of your drive.

Customizing Field Descriptions

On the Song Director edit screen (the screen displayed when you click the View/Edit or Add buttons), you will notice the text that describes certain fields is displayed in blue. This blue text describes a date field, three Misc. Fields, and the eight jpg file names displayed below the Picture buttons. You can change this text by selecting it (clicking) with the mouse, deleting the existing text, then typing your new description.

However, do NOT change the jpg picture file names or you will break the link to the picture. The only time you will want to change one of these file names is to totally delete the file name if you no longer want it linked to that song but do not want to delete it from the SongDirector/Pictures folder. One reason to do this is if that same picture is linked to another song in the database. Otherwise delete the picture on the Picture screen.

Default Settings

Setting Song Director as the Default program for audio or music files.

You can set Song Director to be the default program to play your music files when you double-click a song file in Windows File Explorer. Here’s how:

Display the Windows Control Panel which is accessed from the Start button.

Right click the Start button if using Windows 8 or 10, left-click if using Windows 7, then choose “Control Panel”.

In Control Panel choose “Default Programs” then click “Associate a file type or protocol with a program”, then scroll down to and double-click on the music file type you want to play (such as .mp3). You must repeat this process for each type of audio file you want to play, such as .m4a, .wav, .wma file types.

In Windows 7, either double-click on “Other Programs”, or click the drop-down arrow to the right of “Other Programs”, then choose SongDirector.exe. If you don’t see an icon for Song Director there, click the Browse button, then navigate to the location of the SongDirector.exe file and choose it. That file is usually located in the C:\Program Files (x86)\SongDirector folder unless you chose a different folder when you installed Song Director.

In Windows 10, click “More Apps”. In Windows 8 click “More Options”. Now click “Look for another app on this PC”. You then need to choose the SongDirector.exe program, usually located in the C:\Program Files (x86)\SongDirector folder.

Note: When using 64-bit versions of Windows (the most common) there is both a “C:\Program Files” folder and a “C:\Program Files (x86)” folder. If using 64-bit Windows, when you click the Browse button or the “Look for another app on this PC” link, you will be positioned at the “C:\Program Files” folder rather than the needed “C:\Program Files (x86)” folder. In that case you will have to navigate to the C:\Program Files (x86)\SongDirector folder to find the SongDirector.exe program file. If using 32-bit Windows, the SongDirector.exe program file will usually be located in the C:\Program Files\SongDirector folder since the (x86) folder does not exist in 32-bit versions of Windows.

If using Windows XP, after displaying the Control Panel, choose “Folder Options” then click the “File Types” tab. Scroll down to the file type (MP3 for example) and click it once to highlight it in the list, then click the “Change” button. Make sure there is a checkmark in the box that says “Always use the selected program to open this kind of file” and then click the “Browse” button. Navigate to the folder containing the SongDirector.exe file and select that file.

Duplicate Songs

Duplicate songs are defined as two or more songs with the exact same Artist Name, Song Name, and File Size. By including File Size in this test, slightly different song versions (such as a live recording vs. a studio recording) are not counted as duplicates.

Song Director includes a feature to display and delete these duplicates if desired, leaving only one unique record for each song. To access this feature, select any of the following three options on the Edit menu in Song Director. These options are:

Show All Songs with Duplicates (this displays all of the songs identified as having a duplicate)Show Duplicate Songs to Delete (this displays only those redundant songs which will be deleted)Delete Duplicate Songs … (this deletes the songs displayed in the Show Duplicate Songs to Delete option)

This does NOT delete any songs from your hard disk; only from the Song Director database. If you re-scan your entire hard disk, these songs will be re-added to the Song Director database.

Editing File tags

A file tag is information contained inside a file that further describes the file. For example, some typical file tag information for a music file is the artist name and song title. In most cases you can edit this tag information by changing the file properties using Windows File Explorer. You can also edit this information from within Song Director. To do this from the Edit window in Song Director, click on the “Edit tag” button next to the File name field. This displays a File Explorer window of the folder containing this song file. Right-click your mouse on the file you want to change, then choose “Properties” from the menu that is displayed after you right-click. Click the Details tab on the next window, then select the tag field you want to change and simply type your new information. Click the OK button and your changes will be saved within the file. Click the Cancel button to return to Song Director. This changes that information within the file only, not within your Song Director database.

After you update your file tag information in the File Explorer window, if you want Song Director to update this information also, you can either edit the record manually in SD or you will need to delete your record in Song Director (just the record information NOT the file) and then re-scan the folder or file that has the changed file tags and Song Director will pick up the new tag information without having to re-type it.

Windows does not let you change the file tag information for certain files that do not support tags or that contain invalid tag information.

Exporting Data

To export the records that are currently displayed on the Grid, choose one of the “Export data to CSV file” options from the Song Director Reports menu. Choosing this option will create a file in any folder you choose. You can give this file any name you want.

The file you create is a standard comma-separated-values text file which will contain your Song Director data. Only the records displayed in Song Director at the time you created the file will be contained in this file. The records in this file will be sorted in the same order that you have sorted the Grid by. Most word processing and spreadsheet programs can read this file. Refer to the documentation for your specific word processor or spreadsheet program for more information on opening and using CSV files.

Filtering records

To view only certain records in your database, click the Filter button. The “Specify Record Filter” screen appears. A record filter is simply criteria you specify to limit the records displayed. Filters can be saved for future use.

If you are familiar with SQL, this should be easy. Just specify a SQL WHERE statement, leaving out the word WHERE. If you’re not familiar with SQL syntax, it’s still easy! Simply pick a field from the list, or type a field name in the box. After the field name, specify a comparison operator, such as =, <, >, <> (not equal), or like. Then enclose the value you want to compare the field to in quotes. For example, to show all songs by Bob Dylan or any song that has a rating of 5 stars:

Artist = “Bob Dylan” or Rating = “*****”

If you substitute the word “and” instead of “or”, you will only display songs that are both by Bob Dylan and have a 5-star rating. The number of spaces between keywords and equal signs does not matter. You can have zero spaces or ten spaces before or after the equal sign. Spaces only matter in quoted text. You must also have at least one space between words.

You can use the like comparison operator together with asterisks ( * ) to find any combination of characters in a certain field. The asterisk serves as a wild card character. In other words, any character (or any number of characters) match the asterisk. So if you want to find all song names that start with “Ton”, you would specify the following criteria:

SongName like “ton*”

Putting the asterisk as the last character after “ton” means that all songs whose SongName field starts with “ton” will be found. For example, names such as “Tonka”, “Tonto”, or “Tony” will match this criteria. If you put the asterisk as the first character instead of the last (Name like “*ton”), any name ending with “ton” will be found, such as “Boston”. Placing an asterisk at both the front and the back of a character string (Name like “*ton*”) will find records with “ton” anywhere in the Name field, such as “Wontonki”. This is especially handy for finding some word or phrase in the Notes field. You can also place the word “not” in front of the “like operator, such as SongName not like “ton*”

Finding records with empty fields

Sometimes you may want to find all records which do not have any data in certain fields. If you specify criteria that looks for actual blanks, such as Rating = ” ” you will probably not find any records that match this criteria. Instead, you should look for Null, such as Rating= Null. This will find all records that have nothing in the Rating field. Null is not the same as blank characters. Null is the absence of data. Blank spaces are actual data characters.

Important information about dates

If your criteria includes a date field, surround the date with pound-sign symbols # instead of quotes. For example:

DateUpdated > #12/25/2014#

Since the DateUpdated field also includes the time, this also finds records updated on 12/25/2014, in addition to after 12/25/2014. The time appears right after the date, like this: 12/25/2014 9:02:43 AM. If you only specify the date and not the time, then “12/25/2014 09:02:43 AM” is greater than just “12/25/2014”. This is why if you ask for DateUpdated greater than 12/25/2014, you will also get all records updated on 12/25/2014. You should avoid using the equal sign (=) with the DateUpdated field since it’s unlikely you will ever get a match due to the time data being included in the date. You should use the greater than sign >, less than sign < or the “between” keyword as described below.

The other date fields do not include the time, so criteria such as:

PurchaseDate > #12/25/2014#

will find all records with the PurchaseDate field greater than 12/25/2014, just like you would expect. In other words, it finds all records equal to 12/26/2014 or later.

Specifying a range of dates. The “Between…And…” clause

If you need to specify a range of dates, there is a special clause you can use in your filter criteria just for this purpose. Suppose you want to find all records where the Date2 field is between 12/1/2014 and 12/31/2014. Your filter criteria would look like this:

Date2 between #12/1/2014# and #12/31/2014#

If you need to look in more than one date field for this range of dates, just connect the above statement to a similar one using the “or” clause.

Finding every song purchased this month.

If you enter Purchase Dates you can list all the songs whose Purchase Date falls in any month you specify. Suppose you want to see a list of songs you purchased in March. Your filter criteria should look like this:

DatePart(“m”,PurchaseDate)=3

The “m” has to be lower case, and says you want to see the month portion of the date. The =3 indicates you want to see records where the month equals March, the 3rd month of the year.

If you want to find dates that fall in a certain year, use “yyyy” instead of “m” in the DatePart statement. Similarly, if you want to see a specific day, use “d” instead of “m”. Make sure you always use lower case for the m, yyyy, or d.

Referring to customized fields (the blue fields)

You must refer to each field name as it appears in the list on the right side of the Filter screen. Even though you can rename the field labels on the Song Director edit screen, you must refer to them by their original names as shown in the list. For example, even though you might rename the Date2 field to “Release Date”, you must still refer to it as “Date2” in your filter criteria.

Sorting your filter results

Your filter results are sorted based on the sort order you have previously chosen and can be changed afterward on the Grid screen. You can also sort on any field by using the Order By clause at the end of your filter criteria. For example:

Song like “*love*” Order By Year

You can reverse the sort order by placing the text DESC (for descending) after the field name, like this:

Song like “*love*” Order By Year DESC

You can sort on multiple fields like this:

Song like “*love*” Order By Year, Artist

If you only want to sort without a filter place the word True in front of the Order By clause, like this:

True Order By Year, Artist

This gives you the ability to sort on many fields if needed.

To display all records in your Song Director database, click the Show All button. This is useful if you previously limited the records displayed by choosing a specific Category, or by specifying a Filter or by Selecting Records.

Find Button

To find a string of characters anywhere in your Song Director database, click the Find button, then type the string of characters you are looking for. Song Director will search all fields and all records in the entire database and then display just those records that contain the characters you specified.

Song Director searches all normal fields, but does not search the customized field descriptions you may have given to certain fields. These customizable descriptions are displayed in blue on the Song Director edit screen. For example, if you customize the Date2 description and call it “Last played”, then search for the characters “Last played”, Song Director will not find it. You must refer to this date field as “Date2”. See the Help topic Customizing Field Descriptions for more information.

The Find command is quite powerful, and allows the use of the wildcard characters * (asterisk), ? (question mark), and # (pound sign). The asterisk matches any number of characters, so th* finds the, there, and three, while *ow finds how, wow, and plow. The question mark matches any single character, so h?t finds hat and hit. The pound sign works like the question mark, except it matches any single number, so 2#4 finds 234, 214, 294, etc. The left and right square brackets [ ] match any single character within the brackets, and you can put multiple characters in there. For example, d[oi]g finds dog and dig.

You may want to refrain from using these wildcard characters within your data to avoid confusing the Find command. However, you can match on these characters if they appear in your data by enclosing them in square brackets. For example, if you want to search for a question mark in your data, you would do a find on [?]

To display all records in your Song Director database, click the Show All button. This is useful if you previously limited the records displayed by choosing a specific Category, or by specifying a Filter or by Selecting Records.

Grid (Main Screen)

Description

The Grid is the section of the first Song Director screen (the screen with the menu and toolbar) that displays the records in your database. It is made up of rows and columns, and looks similar to a spreadsheet. Each row contains all of the data for each song in your database. Each column is a field in your database.

Changing the appearance of the Grid

You have a great deal of flexibility in configuring the appearance and behavior of the Grid. Many features are similar to a Windows-based spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. These features are listed below.

Rearranging Columns

You can rearrange the order columns appear on the Grid. Position the mouse cursor over a column heading (such as Year), then click the left mouse button once. A message will be displayed that says ”The next column heading you click will cause the Year column to move beside that column“. This message will give you the option of canceling the move or proceeding. If you click the O.K. button in response to this message, then click any other column heading on the Grid, the Year column moves beside the column you click on. If you are moving the column to the right, it will be placed to the right of this column. If you are moving the column to the left, it will be placed to the left of this column. If you click anywhere other than a column heading, the move is canceled. You can move any column on the Grid except for the 3 left-most columns that have the headings “x”, Song Name and Artist/Performer. Song Director will remember the changed column positions each time you run the program.

Re-sizing Columns

To change the width of a column, position the mouse cursor on the right edge of the column until the cursor shape changes to a double-sided horizontal arrow. Then press the left mouse button and hold it down. Move the mouse either left or right to decrease or increase the width. The column will stay this new width until you change it again. If you change the column width to zero, that column will disappear from the Grid until the next time you start the Song Director program. If you don’t want to see a column, move it to the extreme right of the Grid. It won’t disappear, but you won’t have to look at it anymore unless you scroll all the way to the right.

Allowing/Disabling Grid Editing

There is an option on the Edit menu to Allow Grid Editing. When you choose this option, you can make changes to your data directly on the Grid. When you choose this option, the menu selection changes to Disable Grid Editing, and choosing this will turn off this feature. When Allow Grid Editing is enabled, you can edit your data by first clicking once on a record on the grid, so that row is highlighted. Then move the mouse cursor to the field you want to change, and click once. The field will change color, and you can type a new value in that field. You can press the Esc key prior to moving the cursor off that field to cancel your change. When you move the cursor off that field or row, the changed field will be saved.

There are a few fields, such as the Date Updated field, which appear on the Grid but cannot be changed.

Locking a column in place so it doesn’t move when you scroll to the right

Suppose you want to view or edit a column that is on the right-hand side of the grid. When you scroll to the right, you can no longer see the Name field that lets you identify which song you are dealing with. To solve this problem, you can split the grid in two so you can see the fields that help you identify the record (such as the Name column) on the left-hand side of the grid, while scrolling the right-hand side of the grid independently. To do this see the next section, called “Splitting the Grid”.

Splitting the Grid

You will notice a small rectangular black box (called the split box) which appears at the leftmost boundary of the horizontal scrollbar. In other words, this box is in the bottom left corner of the Grid. When you move the mouse cursor over this box, notice that the cursor shape changes to a downward facing arrow attached to two vertical lines. Once the mouse is positioned over this box, drag and drop this cursor to the right. Dragging is defined as pressing and holding down the left mouse button while moving the mouse. Dropping is defined as letting up on the left mouse button after the mouse is positioned where you want it. Drop the cursor where you want the split to occur.

After dragging and dropping the split box, you will notice the Grid now appears as two grids side by side. You can now scroll each side of the Grid separately. This lets you position a column such as Name on the left side of the Grid, while then scrolling to another column on the right side of the Grid. You can reposition the split by dragging and dropping the new split box that appears when you create a split.

You are not limited to just two splits. You can create as many splits as you need by dragging and dropping the left-most split box. This allows you to have three, four, or even more independently scrollable regions on the Grid. This is very handy if you need to view certain columns that are not located right next to each other.

You can eliminate the split by dragging the split box all the way to the left. The splits will also go away when you end Song Director and start it again.

Increasing the font size for easier reading

You can manually switch to tablet mode by selecting “options” in the top drop down menu and then “set to tablet mode”. Tablet mode can also be used in Desktop mode if you want the names of songs and database information to appear in a larger font size for easier reading.

Changing the colors of the Grid

In the upper left hand corner of the main Grid screen choose File from the drop down menu and from there you can change the screen font, background colors, etc.

Installing Song Director

Clean Award Safe to Download – Tested at Softpedia

Song Director is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10.

After clicking the link to download Song Director, check the area of your internet web browser that stores downloaded files or your download folder and click to open and install the “sdsetup.exe” Song Director installation file.

NOTE:

Windows Smart Screen Filter

In Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 The Windows “Smart Screen Filter” is used by the operating system and also in Microsoft Internet Explorer or Edge web browser. Using these browsers with Smart Screen Filter turned on may prevent you from downloading Song Director. This is because it is a unrecognized new program and is confused by it. If this is the case you will need to disable “Smart Screen Filter” or try downloading using a different web browser like Chrome, Firefox, etc. Click here for instructions on how to disable “Smart Screen Filter in Windows system settings”

To disable Smart Screen Filter in Microsoft Edge web browser:

Open Microsoft Edge, click on the More Actions menu (In the upper right hand corner click on the 3 dots . . . ) > Go to Settings. Go to Advanced Settings and click on the View advanced settings button. Scroll down and Toggle the Help protect me from malicious sites and downloads with SmartScreen Filter switch Off:

To disable Smart Screen Filter in Internet Explorer:

On the Start screen, tap or click Internet Explorer to open Internet Explorer.

Swipe in from the right edge of the screen, and then tap Settings.
(If you’re using a mouse, point to the lower-right corner of the screen, move the mouse pointer up, and then click Settings.)

Tap or click Privacy, and under Web services, turn SmartScreen to Off.

The “sdsetup.exe” file ONLY contains the installation program and NO adware, spyware, virus, etc. It is 100% safe to download and install. Since Song Director is a new program some Anti-Virus software may not have seen it before, and you will need to tell your Anti-Virus software that it is OK to download.

Chrome web browser download area click arrow to the right of discard and choose KeepMozilla Firefox download area – click the blue down arrow to install the sdsetup.exe fileExplorer browser download area – click run

Depending on what version of Windows you are running, you may need to confirm that you want Windows to install the program and give permission to install Song Director – answer YES, OK, SAFE to install, etc. BUT – if you are using Windows “Smart Screen” (in Windows 8, 8.1, 10) you may get a screen like this below:

Windows Smart Screen message: choose the “More info” link

In this case, you must click on the “More info” link and NOT the OK button. After you click the “MORE INFO” Link you will see a screen like this:

Windows Smart Screen after clicking the “More info” link

You then need to click on the “Run anyway” button to continue the install procedure and run the sdsetup.exe file.

After the install you will see the Song Director icon on the Windows desktop. Double click to start the program and then choose “File” from the drop down menu and add songs from a file, folder, or scan the entire hard drive for songs.

Internet Access

Song Director does NOT need internet access in order to work. However, some features like “help”, “look on the web”, and “Donate” will only function if you have internet access.

Keyboard Shortcuts

On most of the screen windows for Song Director you will see one letter of a command button underlined. For example: Exit, View/Edit, etc. This is a keyboard shortcut. Simply press and hold ALT and the letter that is underlined to preform the command by using the keyboard instead of the mouse.

Locate

To locate any record in your database, make sure the cursor is on the Locate box on the main Song Director screen (the screen with the menu and tool bar icons), then simply type a character in that box. Song Director will highlight on the Grid the first song it finds whose SongName starts with that character. If you type a second character, Song Director will find the first song whose SongName starts with those two characters. You can continue to narrow the search by typing more characters of the Name.

If no song in your database matches what you typed, the current record highlighted on the Grid remains the same.

The above example assumes that you have not changed the sort order, so your records are sorted by SongName. If you change the sort to another field, the Locate function will search whatever field you have sorted by.

If you sort by a Date field, Song Director does not try to locate a record until you have finished typing a valid date. A valid date does not have to contain the year. If you type 12/3 Song Director will start searching for December 3rd of the current year.

Note:

Refrain from typing double quote marks ( ” ) in the SongName field, or in any field you intend to sort by and use the Locate feature with. The Locate feature ignores double quotes, so typing a double quote in the Locate field will have no effect. Certain special characters (like * and #) are also ignored.

Look on the web button – Find information about your songs

You can find information about your song, artist or album by using the “look on the web” button. Double click a song to open the edit screen, click on the “look on the web” button (located right above the picture buttons) and the song will be searched for on the internet according to the parameters displayed in the edit menu.

Right click the “look on the web” button and you will get a list of other search options for the web: Lyrics, Album art, Cover versions of the song.

Look on the Web button

Networking

Multiple Users and Multiple Databases

Use on a Network

Song Director works great on a Network. Multiple users can share the same database simply by specifying the database name in the command line used to start Song Director (see below). Record locking is handled automatically by the Microsoft Access JET database engine.

Multiple Databases or Multiple Users Sharing the Same Database

Assume your Song Director database is located in the C:\SongDirector folder, and the name of your Song Director database is SDdata.mdb

You may want to have several persons sharing the same database, or multiple Song Director database files in different folders on your hard drive, while still having only one copy of the Song Director program. This can be accomplished by specifying the full path name (drive, directory, and file name) of your database on the command line used to start the Song Director program.

For example, the normal command line used to start Song Director might be:

C:\SongDirector\SongDirector.EXE

Note there is nothing on the command line after the program name SongDirector.EXE.

If you have a second database in another folder called MYNAME, then you can use the following command line to start Song Director using this second database:

C:\SongDirector\SongDirector.EXE C:\MYNAME\SDdata.mdb

Note that the location and name of the database file is listed on the command line after the program name. The program location and name is the same, but by specifying the location and name of the database file SDdata.mdb after the program name, Song Director uses the database in folder MYNAME rather than the one in folder SongDirector.

Similarly, you can specify the location of the SDdata.mdb file on a shared drive on your Network file server if you want several songs to share the same data.

The command line referred to above is located in the Properties of your Windows shortcut used to start Song Director.

Windows Server Operating Systems

Domain Servers should NOT be used as a personal computer they are for running server services and special server software. Song Director is not supported for installing and running on Domain Servers. They should only be installed on client workstations.

As a test Song Director was installed on “Windows 2012 Server Data Center” If for some reason you need to run it on this type of software this is how the developer did it:

1. Install windows media player and make sure it works by playing and listening to a music file.2. Install Song Director3. Right click on the Song Director icon on the desktop and choose run as administrator4. Use Song Director normally – You will need to run as administrator each time you start Song Director.

You should run Song Director on a client Work Station for example “Windows 7, 8, 10 Professional” operating systems rather than the Server itself.

Virtual Machines and Virtual drives

Song Director was not designed to be used on virtual machines and virtual drives. If you want to experiment with this you can, but it is not supported.

Internet Drives

Song Director is not designed to scan and add songs that are stored on the INTERNET like iCloud, OneDrive, etc. If you want to experiment with this you can, but it is not supported.

Playlists

A Playlist is a collection of songs arranged in a specific order.
Press the “Create New Playlist” button to add a new Playlist.

Add a song to a Playlist from the main Song Director screen. To do this, right-click on the selected song name and a menu will pop-up. Choose “Add song to playlist” from that menu. You must first select a Playlist to add the song to, and this is remembered throughout the session until you change it.

You can also add songs to a Playlist while playing them by pressing a button on the Player screen. To copy all music files in this Playlist to another folder, choose “Copy music files to another folder” from the File menu. This is great if you want to put songs on a USB drive to play in your car, or on another computer, player, or phone.

You can create Playlist files to play anywhere. Choose “Save Playlist File as” from the File menu. This menu option is active once you choose a Playlist. To add all songs from the main Song Director screen to this Playlist, choose “Add all songs to Playlist” from the Edit menu.

To display the songs in a Playlist on the main Song Director screen, choose “Display Only These Songs” from the File menu. To print a Playlist, select the Report menu. To change song order, drag and drop song names in the list to a new position. Any songs without file names will not be included in saved Playlists.

Playing Songs with the music player

You can play a song by clicking on the play or play all buttons on the main Grid, Edit, Playlist screens.

When playing songs with the Song Director music player, if you check the box to “loop”, “play next song once this song ends”, or “skip duplicates” if you want to stop playing the song you will need to click on the round “play/pause” button instead of the square stop button. This is because if the player is in a repeated loop or play next song mode, the player is told to continue playing, even when the song ends.

If you right click on the black player screen, you will see many options for the player including; play speed (slow, normal fast) , play/pause, stop, volume, zoom, options, properties, etc.

Player options

Note: If you are having problems with the Song Director Music Player, or get a “missing wmp.dll error” or ”run-time error 339” fix this issue by uninstalling and reinstalling Windows Media Player. Click the link here to do that

Playing Songs after removing and reinserting an external Hard drive or USB Flash Drive

The adding/scanning of songs into the Song Director database does not copy the actual music. Instead, it simply keeps track of where that music file is located and plays it from the original location.

If you insert a USB drive, remove it and then reinsert it into the USB slot again. Sometimes the drive letter will change. If your external USB drive was E before it may be G or something else now. If this happens and the drive letter changes when you go to play a song with Song Director it will be looking for the song in the old drive letter E: (for example) In that case you must change the drive letter back to the original location when Song Director scanned the drive. OR tell Song director where the new location is. There are two ways to do this as shown below: (If you do not use one of these two ways you will need to scan the drive again.)

Before installation follow these steps: Uninstall any previous version of these filters. (This is important!) Go to “Add/Remove Programs”, remove oggcodecs. Make sure Song Director, media player or any directshow applications are closed. Run the installer. Then Song Director will be able to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg FLAC, native FLAC, and WebM files.

Definition of FLAC & OGG

FLAC
Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). The most common lossless compressed file format for music downloads. FLAC, which is open source, supports embedded metadata and typically reduces the original uncompressed file size by 50-60%.

Playing audio books and voice recordings

Song Director is great for organizing and playing audio books and voice recordings in MP3, M4a/AAC, itunes, WMA, WAV, OGG and FLAC file formats. You can use the “Notes” section of the edit menu to write information about your voice recordings or audio books.

Selecting Records

If you want to display or export specific records by individually choosing each record from a larger list, you can do this easily. Just position the mouse cursor to the extreme left column (the column with the heading of “x”) on the Grid. Then click the mouse in that column on the record you want to select. An “x” will appear in that column, and that record will be selected. You can then display just the selected records by pressing the button which says: “Show Selected Records Only”. This button appears in the lower left corner of this screen as soon as you select your first record. The Edit menu has additional options for hiding all selected records and for removing all selection marks.

Show All Records

To display all records in your Song Director database, click the Show All button. This is useful if you previously limited the records displayed by choosing a specific Category, or by specifying a Filter or by Selecting Records.

Sorting

You can sort on 23 different fields. To sort your list of records in a different order, just click on the “Sort by” box on the main screen (the screen with the Grid and picture buttons). A list will appear showing most of the fields in the database. Select a field name by clicking it with the mouse. Your list will then be rearranged based on the contents of the field you selected. Records will continue to sort in this order until you change it. If you click the “song” or “artist” buttons next to “Sort by”, in addition to sorting by this field, the Artist/Performer or Song Name column will also move to the left side of the Grid.\

NOTE: If the field you are sorting for contains an empty space in front of it, or a special character like “- ( &” The sort results will sort with the spaces first then special characters then numbers, then letters. To fix this – remove the space or characters that you don’t want by editing your record in the View/Edit screen OR edit the file tag and re-scan the file.

Troubleshooting Song Director

NOTE 1: When Song Director is searching, reading, or scanning the hard drive for audio files you may see the message “not responding” Do not be alarmed. WAIT for the process to finish before attempting to troubleshoot.

NOTE 2: If you are trying to play a damaged or incomplete downloaded audio file you may run into problems in which case you would need to play a different file. (If it is a OGG or FLAC file see below for instructions)

If you have a problem:

First follow the steps below:

Install Song Director on another computer and see if you have the same problem.

Sometimes the problem is not with Song Director but with internal computer problems with the operating system. Like drivers, conflicting programs, configurations, hardware, etc.

If Song Director is crashing or freezing or not doing what it should:

1. Close the Song Director (SD) program either by clicking the “X” button or in Task Manager. 2. Restart SD by clicking the SD icon.
3. If that does not help, reboot Windows 4. If rebooting doesn’t help – Download and Install the newest, updated version of Song Director. You can first install SD over top of itself with the new version and see if that helps. If that does not help then uninstall and reinstall Song Director in the Windows add/remove programs in control panel you would then re-scan your hard drive (you can copy your SDdata.mdb data file to a safe place and then copy it back into the SD folder so you don’t need to re-scan your hard drive again)

Music Player troubleshooting “missing wmp.dll” or “run-time error 339”

If you are having problems with the Song Director Music Player, or get a “missing wmp.dll error” or ”run-time error 339” fix this issue by uninstalling and/or reinstalling Windows Media Player. Click the link here to do that

If you have a problem with adding/scanning your hard drive for songs:

Note 1: Song Director is not designed to scan and add songs that are stored on the INTERNET like iCloud, OneDrive, etc. the songs need to be physically on your hard drive or home network drive not on a drive letter that is on the internet/Cloud. Make sure the songs are NOT stored on the internet. Some programs set up a drive letter like D: that is on the internet, but appears like it is on your computer in file explorer. If you want to experiment with scanning internet cloud drives you can, but it is not supported.

Note 2: Song Director was not designed to be used on virtual machines and virtual drives. If you want to experiment with this you can, but it is not supported.

Note 3: If you have a large amount of files to add/scan, and you won’t be using your computer during the scan, turn off your sleep mode setting in (control panel – power options) on your computer. The scan will not run if your computer is in sleep mode.

Note 4: If you are having problems adding/scanning your entire hard drive you should try adding just a folder of music or one song at a time and see if that works.

Note 5: In some situations you may not have permission to access certain music files. If that is the case – Right click on the Song Director icon on the desktop and choose run as administrator. Then use Song Director normally – You will need to run as administrator each time you start Song Director.

Go to Windows Control Panel to Folder Options or File Explorer Options choose the view tab and uncheck the box to “Hide extensions for known file types” and click the OK button. Then re-scan/add your songs.

Before installation follow these steps: Uninstall any previous version of these filters. (This is important!) Go to “Add/Remove Programs”, remove oggcodecs. Make sure Song Director, media player or any directshow applications are closed. Run the installer. Then Song Director will be able to play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Speex, Ogg Theora, Ogg FLAC, native FLAC, and WebM files.

If you are still having an issue having Song Director working properly and this help menu does not help you solve the problem you can email tech support at this link

Using Song Director on Windows Tablets

Song Director will work on Windows tablets when running on full O.S. Windows versions 8, 8.1, and 10.

Song Director Tablet mode

Song Director will, in most cases, detect that you are on a Windows tablet and switch to tablet mode automatically. If not, you can manually switch to tablet mode by selecting “options” in the top drop down menu and then “set to tablet mode”.

Increasing the font size for easier reading

Tablet mode can also be used in Desktop mode if you want the names of songs and database information to appear in a larger font size for easier reading.

View/Edit or Add a record

To View or Edit an existing record in the database, double-click the row on the Grid that displays the desired record, or click the View/Edit button. This will display a screen that lets you change all the data in the selected record. This screen is referred to as the Edit screen.

To Add a new record to the database, click the Add button. This will display a screen that lets you add new data for all the fields in a record. This screen is also referred to as the Edit screen.

The Edit screen contains certain text displayed in blue. These are screen labels that you can change. See the Help Topic Customizing Field Descriptions for more information.

A tip on entering dates

In the two date fields, you do not need to enter the year portion of a date if that date is in the current year. Song Director will automatically insert the current year when you save the record. For example, if the current year is 2015 and you enter 3/4 in a date field, Song Director will automatically save the date as 3/4/2015. You can even enter 3-4, Mar 4, or 4 Mar. Song Director is smart! If you have your Windows international date format set to display the day before the month, Song Director knows about this too.

Capitalize Check Box

On the bottom left of the Edit screen is a check box with a description that says: Capitalize. When this box is checked, Song Director will apply proper-name capitalization to the name fields. This means that the first letter of each word in the top name fields will be capitalized as you type. Unchecking this box means that you will have to hit the shift key any time you want a letter capitalized. This option is only active as you type; it does not change any text already entered. When changing existing data, capitalization may not occur due to other characters already being in the field.

The Tab, Enter, and Up/Down arrow keys

The Tab, Shift-Tab, Enter, and Up and Down arrow keys move the text entry point (the text cursor) from field to field. However, when in the Notes field, the Enter and Up/Down arrow keys move from line to line within the Notes. The Tab key still moves the cursor out of the Notes field. To indent a line within the Notes field, hold down the Ctrl key and press the Tab key.

The buttons at the bottom of the Edit screen

The Back Arrow (a.k.a. Rewind) button is used to scroll to the previous record in the database. Any changes to the current record are first saved automatically as soon as you press this button.

The Forward Arrow (a.k.a. Play) button is used to scroll to the next record in the database. Any changes to the current record are first saved automatically as soon as you press this button.

The Add New button will first save the current record, then clear the current data from the screen to allow you to add a new record. This allows you to add many records quickly. Any of the blue fields on the screen will retain the same values as the current record, also to save time.

The Delete button will delete the current record, then display the next record in the database.NOTE: This does NOT delete any songs from your hard disk; only from the Song Director database. If you re-scan your entire hard disk, these songs will be re-added to the Song Director database.